Configure the Microsoft Mobile Mouse 3600 in Ubuntu

Some days ago I bought a Microsoft Blue­tooth Mobile Mouse 3600. When I tried to pair it with my Blue­tooth-enabled Ubun­tu Lin­ux lap­top, I encoun­tered a prob­lem. I got and error when­ev­er tried to do the pair­ing.

This is my sec­ond Blue­tooth mouse since a few years ago. When I got my first Blue­tooth-enabled lap­top, I bought a Log­itech Blue­tooth mouse because I did not want to waste an USB port with a pro­pri­etary receiv­er. This kind of mice requires Blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­i­ty, either builtin or via an USB adapter, but since all mod­ern lap­tops come equipped with Blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­i­ty, this is usu­al­ly a prob­lem.

OK. So I went home and tried to pair the mouse with the com­put­er. I was a bit sur­prised when I real­ized the mouse was not rec­og­nized. After some research I found the solu­tion.

This mouse uses the lat­est blue­tooth ver­sion, 4.0. Because my ThinkPad T430 only has Blue­tooth 3.0, it is nec­es­sary, before attempt­ing to pair the mouse, to exe­cute the fol­low­ing com­mands as root:

hciconfig hci0 sspmode 1
hciconfig hci0 down
hciconfig hci0 up

These com­mands are for Ubun­tu 16.04 and lat­er.

After issu­ing the above com­mands, I was final­ly able to pair the mouse.

I strong­ly rec­om­mend this mouse. Its rel­a­tive­ly cheap (around €35,00), comes with an includ­ed AAA bat­tery which, accord­ing to the (small) instruc­tion man­u­al, lasts up to 6 months, and saves an USB port (if your com­put­er does not have Blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­i­ty, you still have to buy a Blue­tooth USB adapter if you want to use this mouse.). I liked it so much I bought one for trav­el­ling and anoth­er for my home’s desk­top.